Your heart has to go out to those Blues who follow their team everywhere.

Blues like Sean Riley, who had clocked up 1,258 consecutive games watching his beloved team – only to be locked out on that infamous night in Moscow last season.

At least this time, the travelling Blues will know in advance, and will not have booked hotels and flights before Uefa blithely bring the trip crashing down, and then walk away from the ruins, absolving themselves of any responsibility.

A small group of Blues still made the trip to Moscow, and even hatched an ingenious plot to hire a room in a half-built tower block next to the Khimki Arena, for a high-level view of the game.

That plot was prevented by the authorities with some zeal, and a couple of City fans who managed to get into the stadium were pursued with the same rigour.

Manchester City played CSKA in front of a mostly empty stadium last season

What made that even worse was that once media and officials got inside the ground, it became clear that the ban had been flouted.

Between 300-400 CSKA fans – remember they are the ones who were meant to be punished – had got in, some showing photographer passes.

Others had passes designated as sponsors' or partners' guests, but were wearing CSKA colours. One of them was so drunk he could barely stand, let alone watch a match at which he should not have been.

There was a lot of Muscovite smirking going on that night – not only had a load of them circumvented the ban, they were proud of themselves for doing it.

The shameless Uefa match delegate must have turned a blind eye to all this – and yet this season they saw fit to include the fact that City fans booed their anthem.

View from the tower block overlooking CSKA's Khimki Stadium

That night just added to City fans' unhappiness at Uefa, along with the inappropriately named financial fair play rules.

Since the outbreaks of booing, Uefa have moved to soothe that anger.

They have thrown out a possible charge for the club over the booing, and have even talked of changing the competition rules, which stipulate action against any club whose fans boo either the national or competition anthems.